Chapter Five
Two days later, the first fireworks of the season went off. It was a quarter to ten on the last night of June, and it brought Nolan up out of a dead sleep, up off the couch—heaving and shoving to get out from under the warm weight he only belated realized was Tricia, right before they both fell on the floor. It was the first time since he’d been discharged that Nolan had felt that irrepressible urge so many Vets claimed to feel when certain sounds triggered them. Had he not been dreaming he was back in his unit, he never would have come up fighting. He certainly never would have thrown Tricia off him or landed on top of her, with every muscle screaming for him to army crawl behind the sofa arm before enemy incoming shot his fool head off.
“Upff,” Tricia said, rubbing the back of her head. She blinked twice, and in the fuzzy light of the blue TV screen (the movie they’d fallen asleep to having long since finished playing; one of these days, he really ought to think about signing up for satellite), she looked at him. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Nolan said. But he was anything but okay, and he knew she knew it the minute their eyes met. He pushed up off both her and the floor.
“What happened?” When he offered, she accepted his helping hand up.
“I don’t know,” he lied. Another burst of sporadic pops and crackles made him flinch, however, and she saw it. And then he saw it too—that look that came over her face. The one that was half cautious and half concerned. It was the same look his aunt had given him back when he’d first been discharged and she found him sitting in nothing but his boxers in a corner of her kitchen because he hadn’t slept in three days. Because no matter what he did, it was too damn quiet for him to sleep. His irritation shot a notch higher.
“Time for bed,” he said shortly, and shut the TV off.
Tricia perked. “Together?”
Instant images flooded his mind: the hills and valley slope of her body lying on its side beside him, the welcome heat of her bottom pressed back against his groin, the fan of her hair—soft brown with a swath of pink fanned out across his pillow—so much for taking it slow. How in the hell could he be expected to sleep with that and keep his hands to himself? No. No fucking way. The platonic feel of those images vanished beneath a rising tide of a whole different kind: Tricia lying flat on her back, her creamy thighs splayed as wide as the bonds above her knees could make them, leather restraints as pink as her hair binding her wrists to his headboard, the equally pink bow of her mouth yawning eagerly as he crawled up to kneel upon the pillow beneath her head and feed his cock into the wet sensual heat of her mouth.
His skin was still crawling, and yet his cock stirred and his balls grew tight. Neither sensation helped his mood. “Honey, I don’t think I’ve got it in me to be a gentleman tonight.”
For the second time that night, she blinked at him. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but when did I ever say you had to be?”
Exasperation that had everything to do with how he’d awakened and nothing to do with her lit his temper like a Roman candle. He tossed the TV remote onto the couch where they had been lying and then swatted her. “Bed,” he ordered, without bothering to answer that question.
She went, rubbing at her bottom (although he hadn’t struck anywhere near that hard) and shooting him a disgruntled look over one shoulder. He could have swatted her again for that, but he didn’t. He followed as far as the door before she whipped around, bouncing on the balls of her feet, all signs of disgruntlement gone and a sunny smile now in its place.
“I have a novel idea,” she declared, clasping her hands behind her back. “How about I sleep here for the night?”
“On my lovely fold out couch—oh wait! Sorry, I forgot.” He gave her a pointed look. “My couch doesn’t fold out. My ex-couch did. Which is probably why my ex-girlfriend took it with her when she ex-left me.”
“Oh, we are grumpy tonight.”
“Yeah, well, falling on the floor will do that.” His skin crawled as another burst of fireworks crackled somewhere out in the night. He had his hand on the doorknob, but was having trouble making himself open it. He rolled his shoulders and tried hard to convince himself that there was nothing wrong with opening his front door. His tightly knotted gut was not convinced.
Tricia smiled again, though not as brightly as before. “You could come stay the night at my house. I’ve got a really comfy queen-size bed.”
Instead of his headboard, he now envisioned her bound to her own. Spread-eagle now. Wrists and ankles both tightly restrained and ass arched up high on a small mountain of pillows, baring her precious, vulnerable body to his every whim, every desire… when, of course, he wasn’t jumping half out of his skin each time the fireworks went off, showing his baby girl in irrevocable detail just how much of a basket case he really was.
Nolan didn’t answer her. He couldn’t. Instead, he jerked the front door open and gruffly said, “I’ll walk you home.”
Her smile faded a little bit more, but never quite disappeared entirely. Ducking her head, she fell into step beside him. All the way from his porch and across the lawn to hers, they walked in silence. He reached her porch first and, following what had become his tradition, started up ahead of her to open her door, but that was when the silence broke.
“Daddy,” Tricia said, her tone as grown up as it could be without any trace of her usual, bouncy Little side. “What are we doing?”
Another burst of fireworks. Nolan popped his neck, but could find no relief for the tension mounting on tension, mounting on tension, currently building up the ladder of his spine. No matter how fiercely he tried to relax, all he could feel was the systematic tightening of every muscle he owned. “What do you mean?”
He tried to keep calm, to sound normal. Like a civilian instead of a soldier with every nerve screaming to get behind something sturdy enough to take the barrage of bullets that mentally he knew—knew—weren’t anywhere incoming. And yet his body was on full physical lockdown, stubbornly ignoring the ranting of his common sense and supplementing its own remembered reality to overlap what he knew was real.
Thin beads of sweat began to gather along his brow. For a moment, he almost felt sick to his stomach. No matter how hard he tried to focus on her face, his eyes kept drifting, checking both ends of their street. Quiet yards. No street lamps. No tanks or insurgents, either, despite the reddish glare of fireworks reflected off a distant garage door.
She knuckled fists onto hips, irritation flickering across her features as she said, “You know what I mean.”
Her irritation made his spark and flare. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking for clarification.”
He could smell the unmistakable odor of discharged gunpowder now. Every fine hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up.
She stared at him for almost half a minute without moving or speaking, before her expression closed to him with all the finality of a physical door slamming shut.
“Fine,” she said and stalked past him. She went into her house, and then he was treated to the real deal. Her door didn’t exactly slam, but there was a finality to the way she shut it just a little harder than normal behind her.
Nobody ever meant it when they said ‘fine’ like that. Drawing a deep breath, Nolan scrubbed his fingers through his short hair, sorely tempted to go after her, but he wasn’t fit company tonight and he knew it.
“Fine,” he agreed and turned for home. He only took a single step off the porch before her front door swung open and Tricia came stalking back out after him, angry pink flushing both cheeks and high temper filling her eyes.
“You know what,” she demanded, her tone calm in spite of her anger. “It’s not fine. Maybe one of us isn’t being very clear about what they want. On the off chance that it might be me, I’ll start.”
The boom of a bottle rocket one block over made every knot in his gut tighten hard. He stared at her and didn’t flinch, but he could feel his breaths. Each one dragged in and out of a chest so tense it hurt. His hands were fists at his sides. When she stomped two steps closer, coming toe-to-toe with him, he had the most appalling urge to swing at her. He popped his neck again, swallowing that urge back until he got it once more under firm control.
“I find you incredibly attractive,” she said bluntly. “I would hope that you find me attractive too. I mean, I may not be a beauty queen, but I’m not homely, right? If what you’re doing is taking it slow out of some grossly misguided attempt to give me time to get to know you, I’d like to stop now. While that might have been appropriate for the first week, we’re going on three weeks now and, frankly, I’d like some serious sex right now. So, I need you to make up your mind, please. Is physical attraction a problem here—” She stopped, one hand rising to pat the empty air between them, her eyes widening as if not only were the thought only just occurring to her but also the most abhorrent she could think of. “O-or am I just n-not what you want, or—” she stammered and fell silent, staring up at him, unable to finish.
“Not what I want?” he echoed, hardly believing he’d just heard that come out of her mouth.
She shrugged, her anger dissolving rapidly under the tidal force of her rising uncertainty. “You want to be my Daddy, but…” She hesitated, shaking her head once. “But what about the rest of me? Not just the Little, but the Big, too. Do you want me, Nolan? Because if you don’t… I need to find someone who does.”
Another crackle of fireworks, just down the street now. So close that he could see the shower of multi-colored sparks through the cover of the maple trees that lined the street. This time he did flinch. He couldn’t do this right now. This wasn’t the kind of conversation a man could have when he wasn’t in his right frame of mind.
She must have seen him jerk, or maybe it was his prolonged silence that she misinterpreted. Either way, when she stepped back suddenly they had a Grand Canyon’s worth of space between them instead of a few weathered porch boards.
“Fine,” she said again, softly now and without any trace of her former anger. Turning on her heel, she walked into her house. This time, when she closed the door behind her, she did it very quietly.
And Nolan let her go.
For all of three seconds.
He meant to turn on his heel, too. He meant to go home, wait out the night, and come back in the morning when he was calm, cool, and rational. Then and only then, when he knew he’d regained enough of his control to converse with her like a sensible person—instead of the anxiety-ridden time bomb he could already feel ticking down towards a Chernobyl-scale explosion—then he’d come back and he’d put her fears to rest.
Another bottle rocket burst, filling the sky above a rooftop four houses down with showers of silver, blue and yellow. It was like watching glitter fall twinkling and sparkling from the heavens. And he didn’t know why that made him think of helicopters lifting off or fill his nose with not only the cloying scent of sulfur but the grossly familiar helmet smell of head-sweat and hot plastic.
Nolan meant to go home.
But he didn’t. Because now it wasn’t just the fireworks making his skin crawl and his hair prickle and his nerves buzz with that fight or flight need to move—just fucking move; in any direction, it didn’t matter—it was the sight of Tricia, with that half sad, half lost, and all angry look in her eyes as she walked away from him.
It was that look that finally scrubbed enough nettles across his ass to get him moving, and it was the next boom of an exploding—IED; he ducked—bottle rocket that covered the equally explosive sound of his hand hitting her door. He knocked it open so hard, it hit with a reverberating bang that knocked two picture frames right off her living room wall. One of the glass panes shattered; Tricia jumped.
She’d been standing not six feet in, motionless until that happened. Whipping around, her tear-filled eyes were huge and her face pale.
“It’s the fireworks,” she said shakily, stumbling back a step when he came towards her. “I didn’t realize… I’m s-sorry… I-I-I didn’t—” She stopped with a gasp when his hand caught her throat.
He meant to go home, but from the moment his skin touched hers, it became fireworks of a different kind, exploding not in the neighborhood around them but in the blood pounding through his veins, in his heart and in his head. He didn’t know he’d pushed her until her back hit the wall. He had no idea he was going to kiss her until his lips were suddenly, hungrily, on hers, drinking in her gasp like it was the last breath he’d ever take.
Did he want her?
She latched onto his arm, tense with his hand on her throat, though she didn’t try to pry his fingers away. When he took her hand and shoved it down between them, she didn’t fight but pressed her open palm to his swollen, raging cock when he forced her to. That he was already hard as stone was just one more thing he hadn’t known until that moment.
Did he want her to find someone else?
Were he a little less selfish, he might have been able to let her go. But he wasn’t.
He kissed her like he’d never kissed anyone before her, and like he knew he’d never be able to kiss another woman again. His grip on her throat gentled. Though it had never been so tight as to cut off her breathing, he had scared her. He could feel it in the racing of her heartbeat, just beneath his fingertips.
He tried to make himself stop, drawing back from her as far as he could, bare millimeters of space filled only by the raggedness of both their breaths. He closed his eyes, wanting so much to apologize. He owed her that much, at least. But his chest was too tight and the words refused to come.
Her hand on his cock twitched, becoming the slightest squeeze of acknowledgement. She could have hurt him; he wouldn’t have blamed her if she had, but she didn’t do that either. She turned her arm until, very slowly, she pulled out of his relaxing grip. An instant later, her fingers came to rest as light and trembling as butterfly wings upon his cheek.
“Earth to Sergeant Nolan Anderson,” she whispered, her thumb stroking his skin, burning him with her forgiving touch. “Come back. Come back to me.”
Opening his eyes when he was this broken was the hardest thing he’d done since his discharge from the army. Looking her in the eyes when he knew how far removed he was from what a true Dom should be, from what she needed him to be, wasn’t any easier. Tricia’s smile was as shaky as the rest of her. But then, he was shaking, too.
“For the record,” he said, his throat so tense that it came out as little more than a growl. “I’ve wanted you from the moment I met you. But I don’t know—”
Snatching her hand from his cheek, she covered his mouth instead, silencing him. “Come lay down with me, Daddy. We don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to. I’d just really like it if you’d hold me for a while. Until I fall asleep?”
The pounding of his blood surged in his veins as he pulled out from behind her silencing hand. “If I lie down with you right now,” he warned, “I’m going to do more than just hold you.”
Another boom outside, muted though it was through the walls and windows of her home.
Tricia never flinched. “That’s okay, too.”